If there is so much Tessellation in play in the DX11 patch, it's surprising as to how little performance difference there is between an HD6950 and HD6870 at 1920x1080. In contrast, the performance difference between a GTX570 and GTX560 Ti is ~ 20%.

Either AMD drivers are completely unoptimized, not allowing the 6950 to lead the 6870, or the 2 Tessellation engines in the 6950 are no better than 1 in the 6870 (ie, some other bottleneck in AMD's architecture).

With Crysis 2, Lost Planet 2, HAWX 2, Civilization 5, Unigine Heaven, it's now all too obvious that in its current form (VLIW-4) AMD's architecture is completely hopeless in Tessellation, even after the "driver" optimization, which allows AMD cards to reduce the Tessellation scale.

Based on the 42% lead that the GTX580 has over the 6970 at 1080P, HD7000 is going to need a miracle in Tessellation architecture re-work (GCN?) if it hopes to be able to compete with Kepler in next generation DX11 games with this setting ON.

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It's funny I got down-rated for stating facts. Good thing AMD took Tessellation performance criticism to heart and added 2 Tessellation engines to the HD6900 series. Otherwise, they'd still be stuck with awful HD5870 Tessellation performance if we are to believe all the conspiracy theories of AMD fans.

I hope they improve it even more with HD7000 series and not listen to AMD fans who won't accept facts that NV is FAR superior in Tessellation and AMD needs to get onboard.

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Don't expect anything different from down ratings when you don't delclare amd the winner no matter what the facts are - this is what's been going on for like 2 years+ online now - and the fanatical red supporters are on a personal jihad all over the net.

I'd just like to say NVIDIA won - AGAIN, as always.

Now all the red fans who were screaming crysis2 sucks because no dx11 will now scream it sucks because of dx11 and that dx11 sucks just like physx sucks...LOL...and of course the big evil green greedy earth destroying goblin monger nvidia playing dirty with crysis dev...its like they're all slimy spin doctor politicians man- the commie variety in this case.

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There appears to be a significant amount of blurring to the textures/overall image quality under the Ultra setting. The AA filter is likely to blame. I actually find the Extreme quality settings to be superior to the Ultra as a result of the added blur "glasses" that the Ultra mode brings. A shame really.

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3.

It would be appropriate to bench the Caymans with MLAA as aditional circumstance to be considered, forcing default AA to disabled. It might affect the overall conclusion. Personaly i didn't bench Crysis 2 with a contemporary CPU to get reliable performance feedback on this. And i prefer MLAA over MSAA in many FPS, regarding only image quality. It something to reckon with.

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4.

ATI has release a 11.8-preview Catalyst Driver. The release notes specifically say it improves performance with Crysis2.
Why wasn't that included / compared to 11.7?

As AMD is not a technical partner like NVIDIDA, they probably need some time to improve their drivers AFTER the release of the DX11 patch, so I assume AMD performance is going to improve relative to NVIDIA in the future?

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You make a good point, except as you well aware it is very hard to keep-up with all the driver updates and so on. Usually if company succeeds in providing major performance increase we mention it or even dedicate a separate review. When it becomes available to the public or receives a WHQL status.

We would also like to suggest covering Fermi and Northern Islands articles, since it will give a better understanding in architectural differences between AMD and Nvidia when it comes to tessellation calculations.

A mere driver fix or update is not going to help AMD here. We are not saying that AMD derived products are inferior in the above mentioned tasks, it is just a fact that Fermi has more theoretical grunt.

Lets hope that some of the upcoming drivers from AMD are going to bring performance rise and we will gladly cover the subjects in our upcoming reviews. The same is true for Nvidia ForceWare updates as well.

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"Aside from the few excessively tessellated objects, there's one very odd design "feature" -- the entire water surface from the harbor is extended well beyond the shore inland beneath the city. Although not rendered, the tessellation workload for all this wasted geometry still has to be performed, and as expected the Radeons are much more sweated by this extra load"

It seems that Crytek have done this on purpose.

Also,Crysis 2, Lost Planet 2, HAWX 2 and Civilization 5 are Nvidia sponsored games. The original Crysis,Lost Planet and HAWX also ran better on Nvidia DX10 cards too. Also,the HD6970 is around the same price as the GTX570.

On top of this games like Metro 2033,S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and DiRT 3 use loads of tessellation and run fine on the HD6900 series cards too.

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I'm personally running a PhenomII x4 B55 (555 unlocked) clocked @ 3.4GHz with 2x Powercolor 6850s @ 8x,8x on a ASRock 870 Extreme 3.
I set the Ultra graphics settings to be equivilent to the review, and I am also using the same set of drivers. I did however disable the high-res package as I was seeing lower than 40fps and I don't like getting PWNED by my online competition due to framerate issues.

With the above stated settings I'm averaging 50 at 1920x1200 res, and 65 at 1680x1050 res.

It would be nice to see a RE:RE Review with a PhenomII x4,x6 and AMD Vision or Vision black system.

I'm more than pleased with my performance, and at a hardware cost significantly less than a single 590 and I7 970 combo. Like $650 LESS!!!

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yeah a i7 970, not a sandy bridge 2500k... way to go - great comparison-- everyone should buy that bs 100% I'm sure.
Jiminy crickets - just how STUPID do you expect everyone else to be ?
Why even do it ? Why spew that crap ? An Intel core 2 E8600 beats EVERYTHING AMD has to offer... heck go check Tom's charts...
So say we overclock the $179 2500k(microcenter), on a $99 gigabye z68 (new egg 3 slots 16/8/4) - and heck we'll put the cheapest 1G 460's in for $120 each, AND SPANK THE EVER LOVING BEJEEZUS out of your 6850's TILL THE COWS COME HOME FOR THE SAME PRICE OR LESS.

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8.

When I first ran the game in DX9 I was extremely dissapointed. The game looked dated and I felt that Crysis1 looked much better than Crysis2.The DX11 upgrade really improved the graphics, finally making it look like the 2011 game it should be.I did not run the hi rez 64 bit texture pak, since I only have 32 bit Vista OS installed, however the improvment was amazing.I have a GTX 570 graphic card, and an intel core i5 2500K CPU.I ran the game with all settings set on ultra mode, at a resolution of 1650x1080.I got an average FPS in the mid 40s to low 50s, which is more than acceptable.